The railway crossing sits on an ordinary residential street in Kamakura, Japan — barely wide enough for a single car. Lately it’s rarely empty. Tourists from Korea, Indonesia and Myanmar set up tripods and wait for the small Enoden train to pass, then snap photos at the exact angle where, in a Netflix series, one of the two leads vanishes from view the instant the train clears the tracks. It’s a four-second visual trick on screen. In person, it now reliably backs up traffic on a street that was never built to host a crowd.
The series responsible is “Can This Love Be Translated?,” starring Kim Seon-ho, Go Yoon-jung and Japanese actor Fukushi Sota, which premiered on Netflix in January and used Kamakura, Enoshima and the Enoden line as real shooting locations. The crossing where the two leads first meet became the show’s signature image, and once it spread on social media, it turned into what fans now treat as a mandatory stop — the same dynamic that has driven Korean travelers to chase drama sets at home, just pointed in the opposite direction this time, toward a quiet Japanese suburb instead of a Korean one.
The Asahi Shimbun, in reporting picked up by Seoul Shinmun’s Yoon Ye-rim on April 5, described the resulting strain on the neighborhood: visitors standing in the narrow crossing for minutes at a time to get their shot, residents calling police over blocked traffic and honking horns, and complaints to the city’s tourism division over street parking, litter and trespassing onto private property. One resident told the Asahi that tourists were filming not just the crossing itself but continuing down the residential street, camera running, well past where the show was actually shot.
Kamakura’s response has been narrowly targeted rather than sweeping. Starting March 27, the city began distributing signs in Korean, English and Japanese — reading, in effect, “please do not film this building” — for residents to post on their own doors and gates, according to both Seoul Shinmun and a Newsis report carried by Daum on April 6. City officials also contacted the Japanese production company that handled location scouting for the drama, relaying residents’ complaints and asking that future shoots build in more consideration for the people who live there year-round.
None of this is entirely new for Kamakura, which is part of what makes it notable. The Enoden crossing near Kamakurakōkōmae Station — the one made famous by the anime “Slam Dunk” — has drawn global pilgrimage traffic for years already; this is a second, overlapping wave, just generated by a different country’s content rather than Japan’s own. Josai International University tourism professor Satake Yoshihiro told the Asahi that the freedom to choose a filming location doesn’t remove the need to coordinate with the community beforehand, and that without a real system for handling complaints once shooting wraps, “the disruption from overtourism is likely to continue.”
What the episode underlines is that K-content’s tourism gravity isn’t bounded by Korea’s own borders anymore. The same mechanism that sends fans to a reservoir in Gangwon or a former exile town in Mungyeong works just as well in reverse, sending them to whatever country supplied the backdrop — which means the side effects long debated inside Korea’s own filming-location boom (foot traffic overwhelming small towns, residents losing their own streets to tripod-wielding visitors) are now somebody else’s problem to manage too, with Kamakura simply the latest place finding that out in real time.
Sources: Yoon Ye-rim, “‘한국 드라마가 동네 망쳤다’ 분노…아수라장 된 ‘성지’, 무슨 일,” Seoul Shinmun, April 5, 2026. Seo Young-eun, “‘韓관광객들 안 왔으면’…’슬램덩크’ 日 주민들, 이번엔 ‘고윤정 드라마’에 ‘몸살’,” Newsis, April 6, 2026.
